“INX’s sale would mark a milestone for the blockchain industry. It would be the first security token offering (STO) registered with the SEC, and thus legally marketable to mom-and-pop investors. Previous STOs were unregistered and limited to wealthy investors.
INX has priced its 130 million tokens, which are to run on the Ethereum blockchain, at $0.90 each, totaling $117 million in gross proceeds.
The net proceeds would be used to build INX Trading Solutions, a regulated exchange for cryptocurrencies, security tokens and derivatives. The instruments on offer are a hybrid of utility and security tokens. Investors could use them to pay trading fees on INX’s platform. The tokens would also entitle holders to a share of company profits.”
“Even after growing 100-fold in the past five years, the entirety of the cryptocurrency asset class, which has a total market valuation of $372 billion, is just fraction of the $35 trillion U.S. stock market.
What’s surprising is that still-fledgling digital-asset markets might be more rational and functional these days than Wall Street: The various ups and downs of token prices are sending out bona fide market signals that point to projects and opportunities where capital is warranted, and investors are responding.
Mainstream investment analysts and Wall Street Journal columnists now assert matter-of-factly that the stock market is merely propped up by this year’s $3 trillion of money-printing by the Federal Reserve.
It might all just be speculative hype, but that might actually be preferable to global foreign exchange markets that are heavily influenced if not controlled by central bank officials.
Every derivatives trader that was looking for incremental yield and levered returns has been besotted by the magnitude of moves in DeFi.”
See Also: DeFi Meets CryptoKitties: Axie Infinity to Introduce Governance Token
See Also: Open-Source DeFi Data Platform DIA Raises $15M Through Token Sale
See Also: 0x Price Hits Two-Year High on Hopes Falling Ethereum Fees Will Spur DEX Trading
See Also: Looks Like DeFi is Coming to Prediction Markets
“Since Beijing’s 2017 ban on direct conversions of yuan for cryptocurrency, the U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin Tether has served as a popular stand-in for fiat for traders in the Chinese market.
Over $18 billion worth of Tether was moved to addresses based in foreign jurisdictions over the past year. How much of this reflects capital flight remains difficult to conclusively establish.
Analysts claim that the yuan’s fluctuating valuation over this year and tensions amid the ongoing U.S.–China trade war could be spurring local investors to evade capital controls.
The government has meanwhile cracked down on routes for offshoring capital via foreign real estate investments and other assets, leaving cryptocurrency as a possible alternative.”
“EIP-2878 proposes that block rewards be reduced by 75%, from 2 ETH per block down to 0.5 ETH. The rationale behind this EIP is to bring Ethereum’s inflation rate closer into line with Bitcoin’s (BTC) and to preserve ETH’s purchasing power.
The majority were not opposed in principle to a block reward drop, but most suggested a drop to 1.5 or 1 ETH was more reasonable.
The biggest consideration, in my opinion, should be the security of the network (i.e. how do we ensure the likelihood of 51% attacks remains low, how do we keep a diverse set of miners on the network, etc.).”
“Tax authorities like the IRS might be tempted to regard these rewards as income, as if those rewards were returns on a stock investment. That, however, assumes a lot about the stability of token prices on a PoS network.
The creation of new cryptocurrency units results in dilution. Unlike random fluctuations in network value, which can give rise to both capital gains and losses, this dilution is sure to happen and sure to be detrimental to the taxpayer’s wealth.
The simple model is what if everybody stakes their tokens? Then you basically have the same thing as a pro-rata stock dividend or even just a stock split, which, of course, is not taxed because there’s no gain there.
Rather than the stock market, some people say the best analogy for staking is produce. If you have an apple tree on your property, the IRS can’t tax you for apples growing on it, nor can they demand a slice out of every apple pie you make for personal consumption. They can, however, tax you if you bring your apples to market to sell.
In the absence of IRS guidance, what taxpayers can do is take the most conservative approach, which is recognizing income at the time you receive it.”
“Ethereum Classic’s current hashrate of roughly 3.2 terahash per second is down 74% from Jan. 1 and down 84% from its all-time high of 20.4 terahash per second set in late January.
Regardless of how the defensive mining is implemented, however, protecting the Ethereum Classic ecosystem appears to be an uphill battle after the Coinbase exchange extended ethereum classic (ETC) confirmation times to roughly two weeks after the attacks and OKEx publicly said it will consider delisting the cryptocurrency.
‘Profitability is the only angle miners care about,’ he added, noting that whether Ethereum Classic Labs has the funds to sustain the profitability of defensive mining is an important question. Miners would simply choose to mine ether if it’s more profitable than defensive mining for ethereum classic.”
“The scientists said their new AI sniffs out malicious code injections that can turn vulnerable supercomputers into zombie cryptocurrency mining operations.
This type of software watchdog will soon be crucial to prevent cryptocurrency miners from hacking into high-performance computing facilities and stealing precious computing resources.”
The Disrupt 